Power up your Lean Six Sigma training with Innovation tools and get to results faster. Try Lean Innovation Training (LIT).
What is Wrong with the Traditional LSS Training?
Over the last decades, Lean Six Sigma (LSS) has become one of the most effective and disciplined business transformation initiatives. Many organisations world-wide, including public sector organisations, have adopted Lean Six Sigma (Antony et al., 2017).
This LSS methodology and the associated tools have shown numerous benefits in public sector organisations. These benefits are increased customer/public satisfaction, faster delivery of service, and mindset shift among employees from reactive to proactive thinking.
However, the long LSS training duration of typically 10 days for Green Belts – with a project duration of at least four months – can be a burden to organisations (Lameijer et al., 2021).
Considering the rapid pace of change, completing a medium to high impact LSS project just before the external environment changes is regarded as challenging.
Additionally, LSS is not the best method for identifying opportunities for disruptive innovation (Antony et al., 2020).
As a result, combining the customer-oriented Lean Six Sigma (LSS) toolbox with innovation-driving Creative Problem Solving (CPS) tools in a shorter Lean Innovation Training (LIT) has the potential to overcome the apparent short-comings of the former (Lameijer et al., 2021). We kept the proven DMAIC cycle, as this rigid roadmap is one of the great achievements of LSS.
How Does Lean Innovation Training (LIT) Work?
Our Lean Innovation Training (LIT) consists of four training sessions with coaching in between (see figure). The first session spreads over two days and will (a) teach a solid set of tools, (b) select projects for applying these tools and (c) inspire people to participate.
This session, the introduction workshop, is open to all management and staff and aims to give an overview of the methodology through an experiential business simulation game. This exercise creates opportunities for participants to learn hands-on and transfer this learning into own business situations by identifying opportunities for improvement and innovation. By the end of this workshop, a list of potential LIT projects would have been established.
The subsequent one-day sessions will be open for cross-functional teams working on these projects, supported by their managers.
The focus of our LIT is on application and producing measurable process improvements whilst instilling the mindset in people that they “can innovate”. Therefore, it is powered by action-learning and includes 90min of project specific coaching per team after each training session.
Lean Innovation Training Alive
Our Lean Innovation Training (LIT) has been developed for an organisation who had exactly the same worries regarding LSS as many others. They mentioned:
“LSS takes too long for solving problems. We cannot wait for six months before we have a solution to problems that arise today.”
“LSS teaches tools we never need due to the character of their problems.” In particular, they raised concerns that the usual Six Sigma statistics were not needed when their issues resulted from long turn-around-time for processes.
“LSS Green Belts need to receive about ten days of training and some coaching in order to deliver results and, hence, qualify for a certificate. This is a burden we cannot handle.” This seems to be a worry for many organisations.
As a result, we designed a training that was using the powerful DMAIC roadmap to keep the proven rigour. At the same time, we reduced the number of training days to five. We achieved this by removing some tools that were obviously not of help for the projects in scope. Whilst we kept the waste-reducing Lean tools, we removed some variation-analysing LSS statistics.
In order to increase the novelty of solution ideas, we introduced powerful yet simple Creative Problem Solving (CPS) tools.
And, by putting a fun game at the beginning featuring an experiential learning process simulation.
Conclusion
Firstly, Lean Innovation Training (LIT) yields application and produces measurable process improvements. It may last much less than a LSS training from kick-off to solutioning, depending on the organisation and their rigor.
Secondly, our Lean Innovation Training supports leaders and managers to promote innovative behaviours amongst employees and drive an innovation culture in their organisation.
Thirdly, the LIT includes powerful Lean Six Sigma (LSS) tools to identify the need and opportunities for innovation. Hence, state-of-the-art Creative Problem Solving (CPS) techniques are taught to turn these opportunities into solutions for lean processes.
Above all, do not underestimate the project specific coaching after each training session. This increases the chance for success drastically.
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